To be sure, Morales was a scandal-plagued weight the GOP no longer could afford to carry. If he had been renominated, there was a distinct possibility that he would have finished third in the fall balloting—third in one of the most Republican-friendly states in the country.
Worse, from the GOP’s perspective, as the head of the ticket, he might have served as a drag on down-ballot races in what is already promising to be a challenging election year for Republicans.
His departure improves the party’s prospects.
If he truly leaves, that is.
Morales never struck me as the good-loser-forgive-and-forget type. If he is so inclined, he will have plenty of opportunities to cause problems for the Republicans who just rejected him.
Given that he’s made it clear that he sees public service as a cash-and-carry proposition, there’s a decent chance that he’ll be open to inducements to hurt his former comrades.
Even if he doesn’t—even he breaks character and decides to become a model of decorum and compliance—Republicans still will have problems because their rejection of Diego Morales did not represent a rejection of either his legacy or the thinking he embodied.
For example, the new Republican secretary of state nominee, Max Engling, will have a hard time making the case that he and his party are going to root out corruption in the office. If Engling tries, his two most prominent opponents—Democrat Beau Bayh and Lincoln Party candidate Greg Ballard—will have a lot of fun asking why Republicans, who control every facet of Indiana state government, did not deign to notice until Morales’ poll numbers rivaled those of COVID that he spent almost all of his time with his hand in the cookie jar.
GOP stalwarts are many things, but watchdogs ain’t among those things.
Beyond that, Engling showed in his convention performance that he buys into the hyper-partisan, shrink-the-tent approach to politics that Morales embodied.
He made the centerpiece of his appeal a pledge to close primaries, based on the spurious notion that Democrats somehow had played a role in defeating candidates backed by President Donald Trump and Engling’s sponsor, U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, R-Indiana, in the GOP family feud that was the May primary.
I’ve got to admit that I’ve never really understood how anyone, Republican or Democrat, wins an election by telling people—often quite large numbers of people—not to vote for them.
But that now seems to be a trending rage.
And not just among Republicans.
There are progressive Democrats who embrace this nonsensical strategy.
Deep thinkers like Engling seem to think that telling people who agree with them on 95% of the issues that they don’t want their support unless they can have the other 5%, too, is a recipe for success.
It isn’t.
In a saner time, the first task for a candidate heading the Indiana GOP ticket would be to heal the splits in the party, not exacerbate them.
Those splits are profound. The fact that Ballard—the last Republican mayor of Indianapolis—has launched a new political party designed to be a new home for members of his former party demonstrates that.
But Engling’s message—which, presumably, is also the message of his prominent backer Banks—is that any Republican who has any difference of opinion with him, however minor that disagreement might be, should go vote for Greg Ballard.
The November election is now just a little more than four months away.
If Republicans come up short on Nov. 3, given their pattern, they will be tempted to place the blame on many things and many people.
They’ll fault Beau Bayh for being a well-funded nepo baby. They’ll savage Ballard and all the disaffected former GOP voters who loyally backed Richard Lugar, Mitch Daniels, Bill Hudnut and Ballard for decades as “RINOs”—Republicans in name only.
They might even lambast Morales for being Morales to the end—an unrepentant hustler who took the ethos of the Trump GOP to get while the getting was good seriously.
If they do so, Indiana Republicans will be much, much too modest.
They made this mess themselves.
And they deserve full credit for their work.
